“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

In November, Google changed its tune a little bit…

“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

Did anyone catch the slight difference in this new entry? You don’t have to be a professional writer to see this one.

Then, on March 14th…

“Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

We tend to smell like the food we eat and the liquids we drink — what we eat and drink is digested in our stomachs and intestines, and the chemicals in these foods and liquids are passed on throughout our bodies through our bloodstreams.

I have been hearing a growing drumbeat from angel investors that start ups shouldn’t waste their time writing a business plan. “They suck,” one angel investor told me recently, “Especially the financials. They’re clueless and it shows.”

His viewpoint was driven home with several tech start up coaching clients we worked with. The plans they brought to us did, in fact, suck, including incomprehensible financial pro formas.

Yet, the best run companies rely on written business plans. They revisit them frequently, adjust them to new realities and use them as guidance as they grow. We have seen this personally in businesses of all sizes and found that those that plan not only do better when things go according to plan, but also do better when the plan gets broken.

So who’s right? Why do so many entrepreneurs fail at drafting plans that angel investors are telling them not to bother? We believe it breaks down into the following reasons:

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”

The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Every two months, I pull together a community of innovators. We meet somewhere in New York City, usually a boardroom overlooking a park or cityscape. But last month we all found our way into an acting studio operated by The TAI Group to learn about storytelling.

The members of this group certainly already know something about the topic. They are senior executives at some of the largest corporations, partners in some of the most prestigious consulting and private equity firms, and several cutting-edge entrepreneurs. But the more you know, the more you realize there is to learn, and this group wanted to learn more about how to use effective storytelling to drive change in and grow their organizations.